Validating scientific hypotheses is a central challenge in biomedical research, and remains difficult for artificial intelligence (AI) agents due to the complexity of real-world data analysis and evidence interpretation. In this work, we present BioDSA-1K, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on realistic, data-driven biomedical hypothesis validation tasks. BioDSA-1K consists of 1,029 hypothesis-centric tasks paired with 1,177 analysis plans, curated from over 300 published biomedical studies to reflect the structure and reasoning found in authentic research workflows. Each task includes a structured hypothesis derived from the original study's conclusions, expressed in the affirmative to reflect the language of scientific reporting, and one or more pieces of supporting evidence grounded in empirical data tables. While these hypotheses mirror published claims, they remain testable using standard statistical or machine learning methods. The benchmark enables evaluation along four axes: (1) hypothesis decision accuracy, (2) alignment between evidence and conclusion, (3) correctness of the reasoning process, and (4) executability of the AI-generated analysis code. Importantly, BioDSA-1K includes non-verifiable hypotheses: cases where the available data are insufficient to support or refute a claim, reflecting a common yet underexplored scenario in real-world science. We propose BioDSA-1K as a foundation for building and evaluating generalizable, trustworthy AI agents for biomedical discovery.

Empirical software engineering research on production systems has brought forth a better understanding of the software engineering process for practitioners and researchers alike. However, only a small subset of production systems is studied, limiting the impact of this research. While software engineering practitioners benefit from replicating research on their own data, this poses its own set of challenges, since performing replications requires a deep understanding of research methodologies and subtle nuances in software engineering data. Given that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, show promise in tackling both software engineering- and science-related tasks, these models could help democratize empirical software engineering research. In this paper, we examine LLMs' abilities to perform replications of empirical software engineering research on new data. We specifically study their ability to surface assumptions made in empirical software engineering research methodologies, as well as their ability to plan and generate code for analysis pipelines on seven empirical software engineering papers. We perform a user study with 14 participants with software engineering research expertise, who evaluate GPT-4-generated assumptions and analysis plans (i.e., a list of module specifications) from the papers. We find that GPT-4 is able to surface correct assumptions, but struggle to generate ones that reflect common knowledge about software engineering data. In a manual analysis of the generated code, we find that the GPT-4-generated code contains the correct high-level logic, given a subset of the methodology. However, the code contains many small implementation-level errors, reflecting a lack of software engineering knowledge. Our findings have implications for leveraging LLMs for software engineering research as well as practitioner data scientists in software teams.

The two authors contributed equally to this work. Data, analysis code, and additional materials will be openly available at the project's Open Science Framework page if it is accepted for publication by a journal. We have no conflicts of interest to disclose. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jin Kim (Advanced Institute of Business, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. PERCEIVED GENDER OF CHATGPT 2 Abstract We investigate how people perceive ChatGPT, and, in particular, how they assign human-like attributes such as gender to the chatbot. Across five pre-registered studies (N = 1,552), we find that people are more likely to perceive ChatGPT to be male than female. Specifically, people perceive male gender identity (1) following demonstrations of ChatGPT's core abilities (e.g., providing information or summarizing text), (2) in the absence of such demonstrations, and (3) across different methods of eliciting perceived gender (using various scales and asking to name ChatGPT). Moreover, we find that this seemingly default perception of ChatGPT as male can reverse when ChatGPT's feminine-coded abilities are highlighted (e.g., providing emotional support for a user).